Variations of the Lyrical Subject: Intersections between Authorial Subjectivity and Biographical Material in Silvina Ocampo’s Invenciones del recuerdo

Abstract

This article examines Silvina Ocampo’s Invenciones del recuerdo as a work located at the intersection of autobiography and poetic fiction. Drawing on Agamben’s concept of a “zone of indifference,” it argues that the text does not transmit lived experience directly but reshapes it through memory as a creative procedure. The lyrical “I” distances itself from the biographical self, transforming it into a poetic figure. Forgotten names, distorted spaces, and the notion of a “prenatal autobiography” reveal how Ocampo turns the personal into myth and creative potential. Memory here functions less as testimony than as aesthetic invention. Within this framework, the poetic self emerges as paradoxically more “real” than the biographical one, as it illuminates aspects of experience that confession alone could not capture. The book thus constructs a hybrid space in which autobiographical traces and fictional procedures are inseparable, making memory itself a site of invention.